Alzrius
The EN World kitten
Mod edit-- [+] marker removed.
4E remains the most divisive edition of D&D ever to be released, as well as the one with the shortest lifespan not only in the 21st century, but arguably (depending on how you look at the differences between some of the older editions) in the entire history of the game. Why that is, however, remains controversial. While it's not really arguable that there were a great deal of issues external to the framework of the game rules itself – the GSL, the DDI, and the marketing campaign, to name just a few – there were also a number of changes to the rules, and their presentation, that large swaths of the gaming community found unpalatable.
Now, there's no way to measure how many people didn't like various aspects of the game, let alone the degree of their dislike. But the overall effects aren't open to denial. 3.X had a few months shy of eight years, and then got a new lease on life through Pathfinder. 5E is about to hit its ten-year anniversary, and is looking at a new iteration so modest it's questionable if it can even be called a "half"-edition (i.e. 5.5). In between these, 4E sits as the odd edition out. Why?
Leaving aside the aforementioned related issues, it's worthwhile to look at what 4E did differently from its predecessors in terms of what caused the most push-back. Moreover, it's important to figure out the nature, scope, and extent of those changes, if for no other reason than because they're instructive to our understanding of what tabletop RPGs are and how they work. To that end, we need to be able to look at 4E and evaluate the areas that received the strongest rejection, and we need to be able to do so without getting bogged down by people insisting that what people identified as problematic areas aren't actually problematic at all, that no one really understood the game, that the objections were based on hype and misunderstandings rather than fact, etc.
To that end, this thread (spun off from a related one, where an insightful discussion was derailed by the aforementioned claims being made) is dedicated to examining one (and only one) of the areas where 4E received some of its strongest objections. An area that I've dubbed "the cognitive gap."
A. Defining the Cognitive Gap
Consider the following scenario, presented from an in-game standpoint.
Sounds like something that could come from any edition of D&D, doesn't it? Or quite a few other tabletop RPGs, or even other games entirely, for that matter.
And yet, the above actually describes a game of chess, wherein a knight takes a bishop that hasn't yet been brought into play.
So what's the point of all that? Simply put: to showcase that you can have coherent and verisimilitudinous play with any game, if you don't mind making the characterizations on your own. Games such as Monopoly and Clue(do) lend themselves to that, having the trappings of a story already, but you can apply it anywhere, making checkers about a mob fighting for kingship, rochambeau about a streetfight with unconventional weapons, and Jenga about architecture (or mental stability, to extend a popular alternative use).
However, not every game makes this equally easy. Chess or Clue(do) lend themselves much more to creating these in-character understandings than rochambeau does, by way of conveying more information about what's being abstracted (particularly since some games don't even confirm that an abstract representation is taking place to begin with, e.g. tictactoe, requiring that such an understanding be established in the first place) and contextualizing it within the fictional world (which is itself meant to be a persistent and expansive world, i.e. one you can run a campaign in). So while any game can, with enough work, let you build an in-character framework on its rules, the amount of effort that you'll have to put in to make that work can vary considerably.
That cognitive effort that the players have to do to bridge the gap between what the mechanics are and what they tell us about the in-character state of play is the "cognitive gap."
B. 4E and the Gap
The thing to take away here is that all games, presuming that there's any in-character modeling going on, have some degree of cognitive gap. That's simply unavoidable; you can't have a perfect simulation of a fantasy world, and so there will always be some degree of abstraction going on which requires the players to bridge. Likewise, different players (including GMs) will find different "ranges" of gaps preferable. Some won't balk at turning chess into an in-character game like the above. Others will want as much definition handled by the operations of the game mechanics as possible.
So where does 4E fit into the picture?
As an edition of D&D, 4E naturally invites comparison to its predecessors in terms of how much the game's rules tell us about the world it portrays. On a prima facie reading, it seems to do fairly well, as it carries forward any number of D&D traditions (even as it breaks from others, e.g. alignment) and the 4E PHB even has in-character descriptions of how its powers work. For instance, look at the Healing Word power on page 63:
Or the Inspiring Word power on page 145:
Both seem fairly straightforward in what they are, and what they do, nicely bridging the gap, right?
Well, look again.
See, the thing about connecting the gap between the mechanics and what they represent is that this bridging isn't done in isolation. It's being done in pursuit of a larger goal: to contextualize an entire fictional world, one which is meant to be expansive and persistent over multiple courses of play (even if it can be used for smaller, or even single, such instances). To that end, bridging the gap means not only tying the operations of the game mechanics to the in-character actions they represent, but to do so in terms of a larger, cohesive whole.
Which brings us back to the two powers cited above. Both have the same mechanic, which is that the target gets to spend a healing surge and regain an additional 1d6 hit points. But the in-character representation for this, the same operation, is two very different things: one involves healing physical injury, whereas the other involves "courage and determination" rather than closing wounds (with a reference to healing that's also hard to contextualize with the rest of the sentence).
One game mechanic, i.e. hit point restoration, is now being contextualized as two different things. Faced with two different explanations, the question of what that mechanic represents from an in-game standpoint becomes murky, with different explanations being offered, meaning that they have to be reconciled if the different interpretations come to clash in the course of play. (For example, if you only have 2 hit points left after being dealt an injury, recover 7 hit points of "courage and resilience," and then take 5 hit points of injury, you have 4 hit points left, but you've lost all of the hit points that were previously tagged as being contextualized as wounds, so how are you still alive?)
And just like that, we've the cognitive gap has widened.
C. The Changing Paradigm
Now, a common refrain when this instance of the mechanics serving double-duty is pointed out is that hit points have always been multiple things, going all the way back to AD&D. "Just look," say people, "at page 82 of the 1E DMG! Gary Gygax flat-out says that hit point loss isn't just injury!"
And that would seem to suggest that 4E's presentation is, at the very least, no greater a cognitive gap than what D&D has previously seen.
The problem here is that, outside of one or two other places (i.e. the AD&D PHB p. 34) where Gygax makes the same claim, he never actually makes this point in the game's actual mechanics. Insofar as the actual operations of the rules go, there are simply no instances of the "hit points are a lot of different things" idea to be found. Take, for instance, the basic clerical healing spell, which is named cure light wounds (AD&D 1E PHB, p. 43). Even if we overlook the name itself (which we shouldn't, as the name is also part of what the game is telling us about the mechanics in-character presentation), it says (emphasis mine):
Similar instances abound with regard to restoring hit points. Nowhere in AD&D do we find an instance of a spell called restore luck or renew divine protection to replenish hit points. Even when it comes to psionics, we're told (AD&D 1E DMG p. 77; emphasis mine):
Or with regard to being hit by poisoned weapons (AD&D 1E DMG, p. 81):
If that last one sounds like a further repudiation of hit point loss being injury, read it again. Gygax says it's not an injury "at least in proportion" to the damage taken, which essentially grants the idea that the damage is being taken...it's just not "proportional" and so might be a "mere scratch."
That's actually rather important, because it reminds us that the bridging the cognitive gap is essentially an order of operations wherein we take what the game's rules are and build upon them until we've reached the desired level of in-character presentation. For instance, using the method described in the actual AD&D 1E game rules (as opposed to the Gygax's mini-essays), a player bridging the gap would go through some variation of the following cognitive process:
D. Areas of Interpretation
Now, it needs to be said that no abstraction is going to be perfect; remember, every game has a cognitive gap of some degree. What strikes me as the most salient takeaway is that when a game is around long enough, people grow to learn where its cognitive gaps are and how much work it takes to bridge them (and, most importantly, if that's work that they're comfortable performing again and again during the course of play). For D&D, I'd say that even across multiple edition changes, most players felt that they knew where the cognitive gaps were and were comfortable bridging them.
Then 4E came along and completely changed everything.
As noted before, different people have different degrees to which they're fine bridging (or simply ignoring) a particular gap. But when you change one or more gaps for an established game, you run into issues of confounded expectations. For whatever reason, few things upset fans more than having their expectations betrayed, and for a lot of people 4E's shifting of where the bridges over its cognitive gaps needed to be built was quite a few bridges too far. The hit point issue is just one example in that regard, but remains a central one, as it's still being talked about all these years later.
To that end, it remains to be seen how much 5E 2024 (or whatever it ends up being called), shuffles the gaps around, and how much bridging players will need to do.
4E remains the most divisive edition of D&D ever to be released, as well as the one with the shortest lifespan not only in the 21st century, but arguably (depending on how you look at the differences between some of the older editions) in the entire history of the game. Why that is, however, remains controversial. While it's not really arguable that there were a great deal of issues external to the framework of the game rules itself – the GSL, the DDI, and the marketing campaign, to name just a few – there were also a number of changes to the rules, and their presentation, that large swaths of the gaming community found unpalatable.
Now, there's no way to measure how many people didn't like various aspects of the game, let alone the degree of their dislike. But the overall effects aren't open to denial. 3.X had a few months shy of eight years, and then got a new lease on life through Pathfinder. 5E is about to hit its ten-year anniversary, and is looking at a new iteration so modest it's questionable if it can even be called a "half"-edition (i.e. 5.5). In between these, 4E sits as the odd edition out. Why?
Leaving aside the aforementioned related issues, it's worthwhile to look at what 4E did differently from its predecessors in terms of what caused the most push-back. Moreover, it's important to figure out the nature, scope, and extent of those changes, if for no other reason than because they're instructive to our understanding of what tabletop RPGs are and how they work. To that end, we need to be able to look at 4E and evaluate the areas that received the strongest rejection, and we need to be able to do so without getting bogged down by people insisting that what people identified as problematic areas aren't actually problematic at all, that no one really understood the game, that the objections were based on hype and misunderstandings rather than fact, etc.
To that end, this thread (spun off from a related one, where an insightful discussion was derailed by the aforementioned claims being made) is dedicated to examining one (and only one) of the areas where 4E received some of its strongest objections. An area that I've dubbed "the cognitive gap."
A. Defining the Cognitive Gap
Consider the following scenario, presented from an in-game standpoint.
Pushing deep into hostile territory, the knight crept toward the flank of the enemy army. It was yet early in the war, and much of their foes had yet to take to the field, with their forward lines barely mustered. It was a weakness that he was fully intent on taking advantage of now.
Advancing toward the frontmost row of soldiers, unskilled combatants whose purpose was to serve as little more than living shields for their betters in the rear ranks, the knight paused. What he was about to do violated all of the rules of chivalry that he'd grown up with. But those rules would mean little, he knew, if his kingdom fell. "The dead," his king had so solemnly informed him when giving him this mission, "can make no objections as to their killer's conduct." It was the harsh truth between the tourney circuit and the realities of war.
Steeling himself, he dug his spurs into his destrier, charging forward with a battlecry. Ahead of him, the frontmost soldiers shouted in alarm, but were too slow to react as he leaped past their ranks, pushing behind them. Bringing his weapon around, the knight swung as hard as he could at his true target: the clergyman who accompanied them, daring to sanctify their aggression into honest mens' lands. As the blow landed, striking the pontiff down in a single strike, he could already see the ranks of soldiers closing around him, knowing that he'd have to fight harder than he ever had if he wanted to escape. But the deed was done, and the enemy's ecclesiastical support crippled.
He could only hope that it was enough.
Sounds like something that could come from any edition of D&D, doesn't it? Or quite a few other tabletop RPGs, or even other games entirely, for that matter.
And yet, the above actually describes a game of chess, wherein a knight takes a bishop that hasn't yet been brought into play.
So what's the point of all that? Simply put: to showcase that you can have coherent and verisimilitudinous play with any game, if you don't mind making the characterizations on your own. Games such as Monopoly and Clue(do) lend themselves to that, having the trappings of a story already, but you can apply it anywhere, making checkers about a mob fighting for kingship, rochambeau about a streetfight with unconventional weapons, and Jenga about architecture (or mental stability, to extend a popular alternative use).
However, not every game makes this equally easy. Chess or Clue(do) lend themselves much more to creating these in-character understandings than rochambeau does, by way of conveying more information about what's being abstracted (particularly since some games don't even confirm that an abstract representation is taking place to begin with, e.g. tictactoe, requiring that such an understanding be established in the first place) and contextualizing it within the fictional world (which is itself meant to be a persistent and expansive world, i.e. one you can run a campaign in). So while any game can, with enough work, let you build an in-character framework on its rules, the amount of effort that you'll have to put in to make that work can vary considerably.
That cognitive effort that the players have to do to bridge the gap between what the mechanics are and what they tell us about the in-character state of play is the "cognitive gap."
B. 4E and the Gap
The thing to take away here is that all games, presuming that there's any in-character modeling going on, have some degree of cognitive gap. That's simply unavoidable; you can't have a perfect simulation of a fantasy world, and so there will always be some degree of abstraction going on which requires the players to bridge. Likewise, different players (including GMs) will find different "ranges" of gaps preferable. Some won't balk at turning chess into an in-character game like the above. Others will want as much definition handled by the operations of the game mechanics as possible.
So where does 4E fit into the picture?
As an edition of D&D, 4E naturally invites comparison to its predecessors in terms of how much the game's rules tell us about the world it portrays. On a prima facie reading, it seems to do fairly well, as it carries forward any number of D&D traditions (even as it breaks from others, e.g. alignment) and the 4E PHB even has in-character descriptions of how its powers work. For instance, look at the Healing Word power on page 63:
Or the Inspiring Word power on page 145:
Both seem fairly straightforward in what they are, and what they do, nicely bridging the gap, right?
Well, look again.
See, the thing about connecting the gap between the mechanics and what they represent is that this bridging isn't done in isolation. It's being done in pursuit of a larger goal: to contextualize an entire fictional world, one which is meant to be expansive and persistent over multiple courses of play (even if it can be used for smaller, or even single, such instances). To that end, bridging the gap means not only tying the operations of the game mechanics to the in-character actions they represent, but to do so in terms of a larger, cohesive whole.
Which brings us back to the two powers cited above. Both have the same mechanic, which is that the target gets to spend a healing surge and regain an additional 1d6 hit points. But the in-character representation for this, the same operation, is two very different things: one involves healing physical injury, whereas the other involves "courage and determination" rather than closing wounds (with a reference to healing that's also hard to contextualize with the rest of the sentence).
One game mechanic, i.e. hit point restoration, is now being contextualized as two different things. Faced with two different explanations, the question of what that mechanic represents from an in-game standpoint becomes murky, with different explanations being offered, meaning that they have to be reconciled if the different interpretations come to clash in the course of play. (For example, if you only have 2 hit points left after being dealt an injury, recover 7 hit points of "courage and resilience," and then take 5 hit points of injury, you have 4 hit points left, but you've lost all of the hit points that were previously tagged as being contextualized as wounds, so how are you still alive?)
And just like that, we've the cognitive gap has widened.
C. The Changing Paradigm
Now, a common refrain when this instance of the mechanics serving double-duty is pointed out is that hit points have always been multiple things, going all the way back to AD&D. "Just look," say people, "at page 82 of the 1E DMG! Gary Gygax flat-out says that hit point loss isn't just injury!"
And that would seem to suggest that 4E's presentation is, at the very least, no greater a cognitive gap than what D&D has previously seen.
The problem here is that, outside of one or two other places (i.e. the AD&D PHB p. 34) where Gygax makes the same claim, he never actually makes this point in the game's actual mechanics. Insofar as the actual operations of the rules go, there are simply no instances of the "hit points are a lot of different things" idea to be found. Take, for instance, the basic clerical healing spell, which is named cure light wounds (AD&D 1E PHB, p. 43). Even if we overlook the name itself (which we shouldn't, as the name is also part of what the game is telling us about the mechanics in-character presentation), it says (emphasis mine):
Similar instances abound with regard to restoring hit points. Nowhere in AD&D do we find an instance of a spell called restore luck or renew divine protection to replenish hit points. Even when it comes to psionics, we're told (AD&D 1E DMG p. 77; emphasis mine):
Or with regard to being hit by poisoned weapons (AD&D 1E DMG, p. 81):
If that last one sounds like a further repudiation of hit point loss being injury, read it again. Gygax says it's not an injury "at least in proportion" to the damage taken, which essentially grants the idea that the damage is being taken...it's just not "proportional" and so might be a "mere scratch."
That's actually rather important, because it reminds us that the bridging the cognitive gap is essentially an order of operations wherein we take what the game's rules are and build upon them until we've reached the desired level of in-character presentation. For instance, using the method described in the actual AD&D 1E game rules (as opposed to the Gygax's mini-essays), a player bridging the gap would go through some variation of the following cognitive process:
- Determine hit points regained
- Contextualize this with injuries taken when hit points were lost.
- Determine hit points regained
- Determine if this means injuries were healed or courage/resilience is restored.
- Contextualize this with how injuries were taken and/or how courage/resilience was lost when hit points were lost.
D. Areas of Interpretation
Now, it needs to be said that no abstraction is going to be perfect; remember, every game has a cognitive gap of some degree. What strikes me as the most salient takeaway is that when a game is around long enough, people grow to learn where its cognitive gaps are and how much work it takes to bridge them (and, most importantly, if that's work that they're comfortable performing again and again during the course of play). For D&D, I'd say that even across multiple edition changes, most players felt that they knew where the cognitive gaps were and were comfortable bridging them.
Then 4E came along and completely changed everything.
As noted before, different people have different degrees to which they're fine bridging (or simply ignoring) a particular gap. But when you change one or more gaps for an established game, you run into issues of confounded expectations. For whatever reason, few things upset fans more than having their expectations betrayed, and for a lot of people 4E's shifting of where the bridges over its cognitive gaps needed to be built was quite a few bridges too far. The hit point issue is just one example in that regard, but remains a central one, as it's still being talked about all these years later.
To that end, it remains to be seen how much 5E 2024 (or whatever it ends up being called), shuffles the gaps around, and how much bridging players will need to do.
Last edited:
